It's that time of year...vacation season! Residents across the Washington, D.C. metro area are traveling to the many beaches and resorts just a day trip away! For most people, smart phones, tablets, and laptops play a huge role in everyday life, and even more so for those in the technology industry. Nonetheless, summer vacation is no excuse for travelers to neglect their cyber security. In fact, data thieves are more likely to strike when you are most relaxed and in places where people tend to let their guard down.

So OpenSSL is being patched again, very shortly after the Heartbleed Bug was fixed. According to the OpenSSL Security Advisory, multiple security vulnerabilities affecting the security layer have been recently discovered. One of the security threats actually allowed an attacker to see and modify traffic between an OpenSSL server and the client. While this news might seem bad, finding these vulnerabilities indicate that OpenSSL is frequently monitored by security professionals, and the appropriate steps are being followed to patch these vulnerabilities. This in turn makes OpenSSL a more secure implementation of the protocols SSL/TLS (Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security).

While the Internet is an integral part of most organizations today, this widely used public network is also the source of data theft, cyber stalking and many other dangerous threats. Navigating the web safely can be particularly difficult---many cannot identify a threat before it strikes.

We have scheduled our next webinar. Its on romanHunter (ROuter MAN HUNTER). romanHunter is an open source wireless honeypot that has a number of tricks which can help you to bait and catch people attacking your network.

Christian R. Crank, a security researcher and instructor for us recently created this video on a phishing attack using Meterpreter and Ettercap. This is a lab that students perform in our Certified Ethical Hacker class. Enjoy!

Mobile applications have increasingly become a popular way to reach customers in today’s digitally-driven society. With over 50 million applications in the market today, the industry continues to grow at a rapid pace. By 2015, experts expect the development of mobile applications to outnumber PC projects at a ratio of four to one. But while millions of consumers are enjoying the abundance of various beneficial and useful apps, many of them are unbeknownst to the security threats several of these apps can pose—because thousands of these app developers are abandoning methods of secure coding in hopes of putting out their products as quickly as possible.

Both Silent Circle and Lavabit recently shut down their encrypted email services. Lavabit was the first to take action following word that the United States government wanted data handed over that would violate customers' privacy. Ladar Levison, owner of Lavabit, said he faced the decision of complying with the government and betraying the American people or ending the email service he worked hard to build. He also said that he was legally unable to explain the events leading up to his decision due to recent laws passed by congress blocking his freedom of speech.

Across the country and around the world, cyber attackers continue to discover new and improved ways of wreaking havoc with company's business operations. Their nefarious activities are responsible for billions of dollars' worth of damages in intellectual property theft. While cyber security teams attempt to circumvent these onslaughts, increased technological advancements continue to speed up the time between perceived threat and actual intrusion. How can a business entity keep up?

Social networks are social by design. They mean to foster interaction, to put you in touch in one way or another. Some put you in touch with friends and family. Others put you out there for the whole wide world to see. Some uses are personal. Others are all business. In the end, though, social media platforms are all designed to be easy to access and easy to use. They’re intentionally informal. They’re the last place you’d expect to find classified intelligence or the kind of business secrets that companies diligently guard.